


it's taking everything, it's taken everything

by starvels (dinosaur)



Series: Cap-IM Bingo [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Explicit Consent, Fuck Or Die, M/M, Mutual Non-Con, Rape Recovery, Relationship Negotiation, Sex Pollen, Sexual Violence, Stony Bingo 2017, Therapy, Trauma, Trope Subversion/Inversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-17 22:25:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11278008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinosaur/pseuds/starvels
Summary: The pollen makes Steve and Tony do a lot of things to each other's bodies that they never asked for. Tony’s working on working through it.It’s harder than it looks.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> for my cap-im bingo square of 'fuck or die.' this is trope subversion/serious treatment, but still inherently noncon from both parties involved. and contains sexual acts ending in injury for both parties as well. trauma aftermath. 
> 
> while this fic attempts to treat the topics within with care, consideration and accuracy with respect to survivors, it is not a perfect depiction and should be taken as trope subversion and not more. if there is anything you feel is amiss or disrespectful, please let me know. always open to dialogue. 
> 
> please tread carefully. <3
> 
>  
> 
> title from ['i don't blame you'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Nrw0FWt5M&spfreload=5) by phantogram and i would recommend listening. it fits the feel of the fic v well.

**3 Hours After**

 

 

There’s no one to blame. 

It wasn’t Steve’s fault. It wasn’t Tony’s fault. It’s not the spore’s fault because it’s not sentient and it didn’t set out to ruin Steve and Tony by using them against each other, it just did.

Tony is wrapped in two blankets and what remains of his self-worth, listing sideways on a crinkling clinic slab. Steve is in the room one over. About every 30 seconds, there’s a crash of glass or metal echoing. About every 32, there’s a choked scream. They could set their clocks by Steve’s temper, really.

Tony briefly imagines that’s what they’re here for instead. Just another round of super-solider tests Tony is pulling Steve out of and kicking out at SHIELD medical for.

“You’re in shock,” The doctor says, gently.

 _I don’t feel like I’m in shock_ , Tony thinks, doesn’t say. It never does any good, anyway.

 _I feel invaded, I feel like someone took a digger to my innards, dug me out and left behind dirt and torn roots_ , Tony thinks, and doesn’t say that either.

Steve’s still breaking stuff in the other room.

“Can I go?” Tony asks.

The doctor blinks their eyes slowly and then looks over at something behind Tony. Their eyebrows go up like a question.

He flinches, without meaning to, holds himself frozen so he won’t turn. No one here is going to hurt him, that’s not their job, they’re safe, he’s safe.

“Mr. Stark,” The doctor says quietly.

“I want to go,” Tony says, clenching his hands into the blankets, “You can’t keep me here.”

“No one is keeping you here, I promise.” The doctor holds their palms open and stays away, eyes flickering over Tony clutching at the table, bench, what the fuck ever, awful, cold metal. Their face pinches with comprehension, “I was looking at your driver. In the doorway. If you want to go, he is ready to drive you anywhere.”

Tony exhales.

Happy. Happy is here.

Okay, he can do that. He can leave.

“I’m leaving,” he says, not that he has to justify it, but just –

He needs to be able to say it, outloud, right now. Something has to be able to be said and then done, simply because he wills it so.

Steve is still shouting just every 32 seconds, but Tony knows if he starts himself, he won’t stop.

“Would you like a –“ the doctor hesitates, “We can run a kit, just if you want. Totally up to you.”

Tony flinches back and pain radiates from his knees to his chest.

He doesn’t need a fucking – _kit_.

He knows what happened, they know what happened.

“Did Steve do a kit?” Tony asks, nonchalant with morbid curiosity.

The doctor’s face is unreadable. For a second, Tony thinks they won’t answer, but then, “No.”

Of course he didn’t.

A tightness in Tony’s chest unspools anyway. He wasn’t worried, everyone knows, but – to know that Steve _knows_. It’s the tiniest micron of reassurance.

“I don’t need a _kit_ ,” he hisses, draping his anger over himself and tugging it up along with the blankets.

The doctor doesn’t say anything, just stands there, SHIELD ID clipped lopsided, hair slightly messy and eyes too fucking kind.

Tony leaves.

The breaking noises trail after him down the hall.

 

 

**3 Weeks After**

 

 

“It’s always gonna mess with your head,” Carol says, laying on her back next to him, on the roof. “It’s always gonna be messed up, _in_ your head.”

She’s got one hand up across her eyes, one hand very carefully not digging into the rooftop.

Tony closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to watch.

He didn’t ask Carol about this, but he didn’t not ask her either. Just the line, ‘ _I want a drink,_ ’ in the middle of the kitchen, like a well placed incendiary to their easy waffle evening. And now, they’re here. Comparing scars again.

“Yeah,” Tony mumbles.

“But,” Carol says, a flashflare of warmth at his side, “While the memories might stay, you can heal elsewise.” She sounds determined. Trying to convince both of them, maybe.

Chest ballooning, Tony exhales.

He doesn’t remember it, not rightly.

He knows what happened, because he came back to himself covered in the remains of it. But he doesn’t know, doesn’t have the pictures in his head. The facts parade in text instead: Steve fucked Tony bloody. Steve put sickly bruises from Tony’s balls to his knees. Tony bit a ragged circle out of Steve’s hip. Tony put his dick down Steve’s throat and choked him to vomiting.

Only, that wasn’t them. That was the pollen.

There’s no one to blame.

Tony dreams about it, instead.

Dreams about blood down his legs and bile down Steve’s face. Dreams about waking up again with his his hand halfway into Steve. Dreams about the knife they must have used to cut each other out of their clothes and the scabbed slices it left behind.

He wakes up screaming, follows up with a retch.

There’s a bucket beside his bed now.

There’s an empty room down the hall where his best friend used to live.

He’s not sure what everyone means by healing from it.

 _This week I can sit down without my tailbone ripping itself from my body. Is this healing from it?_ Tony wants to ask Carol.

“Yeah,” He says instead.

He used to be so much more. Now he’s just this; random implosions and lost questions and staring off at the workshop wall until his systems time out.

Tony goes to the therapy sessions, though he’s not sure why.

He never talks about anything about it. Just rambles about stock predictions or the new prosthesis enhancements team while the therapist listens with a calm, empty face. At the end, they say, “That’s good, Tony. Keep working on that.” Or “That’s alright, Tony. Let’s try this,” as if everything Tony’s saying is some metaphor for how fucked up he is and he’s offered the key to his recovery by talking about the state of DUM-E’s chassis.

God, he hates soft sciences.

(He follows their advice anyway though and never quite explains it to himself.)

(He hasn’t known how to explain things to himself really since Rhodey pulled him out of a sand dune 7 years ago. It’s not his fault, it is his fault, this is what he has to do, there’s no right answer.)

He goes home.

“Hey,” Peter says from the ceiling, “Nice rampaging hamster today, huh?” like it’s better to pretend Tony knows what day it is, that everything is fine and not collapsing.

It is and it isn’t.

“Pretty saddle Thor made,” Tony says, just to watch Peter lose his grasp.

“He rode it?” Peter sounds affronted he wasn’t invited.

“Thor would ride anything that didn’t move away fast enough,” Tony digs a protein shake out of the fridge. Someone’s been making sure he’s got at least 5 of them at all times. He’s not sure how to ask who without bringing attention to the fact that he needs it.

“God, don’t make me think about Thor _riding_ ,” Peter says, pressing a hand over his costumed eyes.

“Imagine how many muscles are involved in that bareback,” Logan says, appearing out of nowhere, headed for the beer.

“No,” Peter shouts and pulls his other hand off the ceiling to cover his ear.

Tony takes his smoothie and leaves.

The weight bench in the gym is solid under his shaking legs.

He can feel his pulse in his teeth.

Sex jokes used to be the jokes _he_ made.

Somewhere along the way, he’s lost more than his best friend. He’s lost himself. And he doesn’t have a map to find anything.

 _Back in the desert_ , he thinks.

 _But,_ Tony thinks to himself, later in the lab with the steady, still the same SI engineers, _you didn’t need a map to find your way out of that_. _You found your way out with a scrap metal suit and a hand to pull you up off the sand._ It sounds like the kind of thing Pepper or Rhodey or Bruce would tell him.

Which probably means it’s right.

God, he hates being right.

 

 

**3 Months After**

 

 

They see each other on missions, of course.

Calls out don’t care about your fragile mental state following a fucked up fuck-or-die spore. Calls out don’t even really care about jurisdictional paperwork or lack of available combatant resources, but nonetheless, they’ve got that too.

“Avenue J and down,” Tony says before Steve can even look to him for the question of where the slime trails still are. “Hazmat got caught up at King’s County. National guard is still arguing.”

Steve nods, doesn’t notice the frankly judging look Logan and Luke are throwing Tony.

He resists the urge to put up the faceplate just to stick his tongue out at them. Just because – just because he can’t see Steve outside of the field anymore doesn’t mean he doesn't mean he doesn't belong at his shoulder, knowing what turn Steve is gonna take before he even makes it.

They haven’t lost everything between them, not yet.

Steve is still talking to the police captain.

There’s a patch of something on Steve’s shoulder blade. It’s lopsided, a little like an enthusiastic ostrich. It’s probably sticky.

“Tony.”

“Hm?” Tony pulls his eyes up from Steve’s shoulder.

“Could you set up containment all the way down the line?”

What does containment even mean anymore? A neon sign saying Don’t Step On Bright Fuchsia Goo, Or Else? Holding the line against any possible intrepid worms, or easier, any more slimy aliens?

“Yeah.” He can do all three.

“You’re sealed against any slime effects?” Steve asks, casual because they have a standard for slime and its effects. Their lives, honestly.

“Yeah,” Tony says, checking the biohazard feedbacks again. “No breach and not planning on taking anything off.”

He doesn’t do much removal of his suit in the field anymore. At all.

Steve swallows, too hard and looks away. “Then go.”

“Got it, Cap,” Tony says quietly and doesn’t reach out to touch Steve’s shoulder before he takes off, doesn’t offer to take Steve with him.

They see each other, alright.

And they can’t stand to touch each other. At all.

“I don’t think you have to push yourself to interact with him,” Tony’s therapist says, in that damningly calm way.

“What if I want to?” Tony asks, without meaning to.

“Then there are things we can try. What feels okay, to start with?”

 _Nothing_ , Tony locks behind his teeth. Nothing feels alright.

_I used to touch him every hour. I used to pinch his biceps and punch his open side so he would laugh. I used to press my face to his hair. I used to know he had a shampoo that smells like pine. We used to be a safe place for each other._

“I don’t know,” he says instead.

Doesn’t cry.

He does take a long week rebuilding the mansion security systems from the ground up while everyone eyes him halfway in the wall and walks a wide berth around him. He tugs out more wires and ignores them.

Rhodey texts him sometime during the overhaul of the external sensors.

There was supposed to be a medical debrief from the last mission and Tony definitely didn’t skip it but he definitely had things to do. And apparently Rhodey also definitely has better things to do than remind him to go to medical debriefs.

 _Sorry CareBear, lots to do. Laws of science to bend._ Tony texts back.

Rhodey video calls him, not that Tony needs him to, but. It’s nice to see him. They don’t talk about how the debrief would have been at SHIELD’s medical. They talk about sports instead, Rhodey’s work, the classification of the roses Thor is growing along this back wall of the mansion.

Tony lays in the dirt for a while after he hangs up, staring at the sky.

When there’s another call out for more of the slimy aliens, Tony gets to the site outside of Martin’s Creek before the quinjet does. He’s literally knee deep in slime in a small gully way by the time other brightly colored uniforms drop onto the higher ground beside him.

“Nice to see some more spandex,” Tony says to them.

“We’re down 3 fliers, right now,” Luke says, punching at one of the exoskeletons. It smushes into a pulp of slime.

“Can’t trust anyone to come to work these days,” Tony tells him and starts the climb back up the hill, trying to scrape some of the slime off on the dirt. Hell on the paint, but better than acidic goo staying on and clogging up ports.

There’s an explosion of alien behind him just as he’s moving up the last step and suddenly he’s tipping backwards. His palms are out but he can’t hit the repulsors because the team is right in front of him, and he’s off-balance enough with the weight of the suit, if he just uses the boots it’ll send him flipping back into the slime. Better to just fall, rather than plunge.

“Fuck,” he says and resigns himself to swimming in slime, just before something catches hold of his wrist and jerks him forward.

He slips again as he’s coming forward and ends up heading someone in the stomach.

They make a cut off grunt and move back quickly. Too fast. Tony nearly ends up on his face before he can catch himself.

“Fuck,” he says again, and looks up to complain.

The words die in his throat.

It’s Steve.

Steve, looking at Tony like he’s just punched Tony when he was down instead of helping him, looking at Tony like Tony’s got his arm inside Steve’s ribcage, squeezing down on his heart. Steve, standing there, shaking, miserable to the core.

“I’m sorry,” Steve whispers.

He’s definitely talking about just now but he’s also definitely talking about not just right now.

Tony can’t look away from him, can’t figure out –

Logan rolls his eyes in the corner of Tony’s vision, “You didn’t even – ” he cuts himself off as an alien lunges at him sloppily.

They’re back in the thick of it and Tony moves on reflex, his body feeling numb.  Steve’s face keeps cropping up like the HUD is running it on 50% opacity over the battle layout.

Tony skips the medical debrief to do something more important.

“Steve thinks it’s his fault,” Tony storms into his therapist’s office.

A flicker of eyes up and then back down. “And you think it’s your fault.”

“I – ” Tony flinches and keeps pacing, “I do not. It’s no one’s fault. Didn’t I say that. I’ve said that.”

This time the eyes flicker up and stay there. “I didn’t say it _was_ your fault, Tony. I said you _think_ it’s your fault.”

He careens to a halt in front of the god awful floral print lamp.

“This is fucked up,” he tells it.

Then, he walks out.

Steve’s got an apartment in Brooklyn. Had one always, but never used it until 3 months ago and Tony’s always known where it was but has never been.

“My useless soft science advisor,” Tony says, flinging open Steve’s kitchen door, “says it isn’t your fault. So, it’s not your fault.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, like the very act of it is tiring. He doesn’t even look surprised to see Tony. Just miserable like at the creek.

“Well,” Tony fumbles to a stop.

Steve stares at Tony over the wilted, half chopped kale on the counter in front of him. Steve hates kale, always says it tastes like carpet. Tony always makes a joke at Steve’s expense about eating carpet and enjoys Steve sighing at him and sending him hard to the mat in their next sparring session.

Only they don’t do that anymore.

Tony misses it so much he could spit blood.

“Don’t make yourself eat that,” Tony says. “You don’t deserve it.”

Steve blinks down at it and opens his mouth for a second before closing it. He sets the knife down and then watches Tony as he leans over to tip the chopping board into the trash can at the end of the counter.

Sad green bits rain down as Tony watches silently.

“Right,” he says.

This isn’t working.

“If,” Tony says, kicking at the bottom of the sofa in his session the following Tuesday, “If we were blaming ourselves...”

“ _If_ you were,” his therapist nods just once.

“How would we,” Tony inhales too loudly, “stop?”

Quiet, for a moment. Just the click of clock and hum of the AC.

“Logically,” a pen tap, “What caused the event? The one unchangeable, out of control environmental factor?”

Tony glares at the clipboard holding bird-brain.

“That’s stupid.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I can’t blame a fucking _plant_.”

“You’d blame an animal for stinging you. You’d say lightning caused a fire.”

“That’s stupid,” Tony says again, softer.

“It’s true,” the bird-brain offers, not unkindly.

Awful fucking soft sciences.

He tells Steve about it.

Steve is coring apples this time. That’s fine. Though, if Tony sees a granny smith, he’s gonna start tossing everything in the kitchen he can get his hands on.

“Why are you always cooking?” Tony says, for lack of response after his Fault-Truth bomb dropping.

Steve half shrugs, his shoulders massive in one of his patented too-small blue shirts.

“Therapist,” he says the word like it’s taffy on the roof of his mouth, “said I should take care of myself, do something that made me feel good, was easy, _normal_.”

“So, you bought _kale_.”

 Steve’s jaw sets.

They sit, silent for a long minute.

“I tore apart Dum-E’s chassis,” Tony says, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

The tension in Steve’s muscles unwinds slowly.

“It was awful,” Steve says, catching Tony’s eyes.

He’s not just talking about Dum-E.

“It was,” Tony says, not talking about Dum-E, either.

An inhale shakes Steve’s shoulders. His eyes are red-rimmed and he looks more tired than Tony thought he could with the serum.

If it was Before, he would reach out. He would put his arm around Steve’s shoulders and pull him to the common room and put something soothing and hopeful on TV. He would stretch out on the couch beside Steve and let their bodies touch haphazardly.

He would touch him.

Tony _wants_ , so badly.

But he also wants to call the suit, let it fold him up, up and away for fucking ever, screaming into the faceplate. His knees ache from being locked against the shaking of his muscles and every inch of his gut wants to claw out of his throat.

He’s so tired of not being where they were before.

“Leave the apples,” Tony whispers and forces himself to go sit in the living room. His legs hurt as he tucks them under himself.

Steve leaves the apples and follows, sitting down at the opposite end of his boring Ikea couch. He moves with the amount of preciseness he must have used when it was 1942 and he was newly shot up.

They’re halfway through Space Odyssey before Tony realizes they’re both crying. Near silent, hidden under the sound of sweeping galaxies, the weight of the bold phantasmal colors. Steve is curled in on himself, so close to Tony’s own tense body. He can measure his own gasps for breath against the shake of Steve’s.

Tony’s not sure if he’s ever cried with someone before.

It’s brutally intimate.

Time stretches on.

Maybe it ought to be strange, to be silly but all Tony feels is an echo, like shouting into a pitch black cave and hearing the rocks quiver with the same emotion, return it louder and quieter all at once.

Tony cries and is grateful that he’s not alone in this and hates that he has to think that.

“Would it have been – ” Steve chokes out, nearly lost under the movie, “If we hadn’t, hadn’t hurt each other –“

He’s the first person to say the word hurt in three months that _gets_ it.

“I don’t know,” Tony says.

He thinks it might’ve hurt more, some, to have gotten something so sweet so rottenly. But then again, it might have been better, to not wake up with blood caked over them and stabbed under their fingernails.

“We can’t know,” Tony adds.

And suddenly it seems urgent.

“We can’t know, Steve. We can’t – ” Tony gasps for breath, “This is what happened and we didn’t do it.” A paradox, a plea.

Tony can’t go down that again. He did that. He did the what-ifs. That’s all he used to be. Futurist, see the equation, see the variable outcomes, make possibilities tangible before having the present in his hands.

This isn’t a machined cog, smooth and well fit into the array of their life. They have to make it work but it’s nothing they designed in the first place. They’ve been given a fractured life support system to breathe on and they’ve been choking on it because it was never made for air.

“We didn’t make us like this.”

That Tony knows.

Steve leaves his head on the back of the couch, swallowing. “No, we didn’t.”

The movie plays on, highlights the dark expanse of space.

Fleetingly, Tony thinks of how long this has taken, how far this has taken them into the unknown and then he rips the measurements from his mind.

“I have to stop measuring time in afters,” Tony whispers.

Steve whispers back, eyelashes clumped together, “We will.”

When he turns to look at Tony though, his eyes are the same flame of blue Tony’s lit half a decade of his life by.

And this isn’t a working anything right now, but Tony’s nothing, nothing if not good at soldering misshapen pieces of twisted metal into the future. He knows Steve is there beside him, to stay, to keep the light on overhead.

“We will.”

 

 


	2. Epilogue

 

**Some time later**

 

The magazine cover has a picture of them walking in Central Park. It’s fall. The colors of the trees are something out of a painting, bright and out of focus, blooming in death. Tony’s got one hand wrapped around a hot dog of questionable street vendor origin and one hand in Steve’s. Steve’s got one hand holding a giant bag full of his gear and Tony’s suit and one hand in Tony’s. Their faces are calm, postures lax.

Little bubbles of pictures of them are around their faces like floating hearts.

It’s a retrospective of their relationship, apparently. 10 times they showed off their love without a care.

“It’s nice,” Steve offers, looking at the cover over the kitchen counter.

“Mm,” Tony hums.

Tony supposes it is.

Steve doesn’t say anything, just gives him a knowing half-smile and goes back to the pancakes. Danielle will be toting Jess and Luke into the kitchen in a bit, demanding syrupy, floury goodness.  Mornings exist on her schedule.

It _is_ nice – Tony touches the magazine carefully like it’s a loaded magazine for a colder, more metallic purpose – though not for the reason most people think. It’s nice not because it’s peaceful or happy.

Tony remembers this shot, this day.

Their couple’s therapist had suggested it. _You two have always functioned better under pressure_ , the therapist had said. _Use it to your advantage._

 _What the fuck does that mean_ , Tony had not-whispered to Steve.

But Steve had had his I’m A Strategist’s thinking face on.

And so, that’s what they’d done.

Held onto each other even though they both felt a little like throwing up. Held onto one another because in public they could do nothing else but be at each other’s side. Held onto one another through the battle in their own brains.

Tony went home and couldn’t even look at Steve for days.

But then, then it’d been easier.

As if just taking the jump, throwing themselves into the thick of it was the trigger point. _Put a target on our backs and watch us fly_ , Tony had thought.

And they did.

Tony knows a specific potential for something never realized between them has been ruined. That they could have had something different. They’re in a relationship. They go on dates, they have a joint bank account, they save the world together every other Tuesday. And they’re never gonna have sex together. Tony can’t even handle sleeping in the same bed as Steve some nights. They never spar without full uniforms on.

Every touch between them is calculated, is a system of checks and balances, is an active give and take of constantly reaffirmed consent.

So maybe they lost something, but they took back something too. And Tony can’t entertain what-ifs about that. They built what they have, bleeding, broken, of their own accord.

“It is nice,” Tony says, finally, when Steve puts the blueberry waffles down on before Tony.

Steve smiles at him, fully this time. He sets his batter-sticky hand palm-up beside the plate, offers the touch to Tony.

Tony reaches back.

The world moves on.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> all wrapped up! i didn't wanna leave off with the more brittle part of recovery, and thought some due should be paid to the soft, aching ways that hope can coalesce. hopefully, you agree <3
> 
> the tumblr post for this fic is [}here{](https://starvels.tumblr.com/post/162170137171/its-taking-everything-its-taken-everything) and the tag for all my cap-im bingo fics is [}here{](http://starvels.tumblr.com/tagged/stony%20bingo%202017). thanks for reading !


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